Hello again from my bed, at Soco in Buenos Aires. Today I woke up stiff and weak, so I'm taking the big hint, and staying in bed. I think I'm a little like every animal that gets knocked about, and then puts up a big bluff about being tough enough, but then runs to a little crevice in a tree eventually, and hides until it heals up. All this exciting difference around me isn't enough to get me out and about today. My face feels like a mask, my back seized up like a rusty bicycle chain; I can think only slowly, with effort.
Such a nice, comfy bed, though.
I can hear the street noise coming in from the little balcony--there was just now another spasm of rush-hour traffic pique, expressed via dozens of auto horns, which blare petulantly, until they are interrupted by the sound of a Guardia Federal whistle. That is the sound of the Guardia directing traffic, and thereafter the horns stop, and the zooming resumes. And then it repeats.
I like that, and I also like the aetherial chorus of four A.M., which is generated by the synchromesh transmissions of countless distant delivery trucks, echoing in parallel, in confused organum, against the masonry of these numberless crowded buildings. I could not hear the engines at first, only that gear-harmony, which somehow travels much farther, and I did not, at first, realize it was mechanical in nature--it sounded like some natural trick of the winds, through a canyon of tortured sandstone maybe, or a vast opera chorus, performing a festival street version of Mahler or Holst.
Yesterday A. and I went into an anthropological museum, just a little place with artifacts and textiles of local indigenous, including evidence of the presence of the Inca Empire. Heck of a long way for an empire to stretch without jet aircraft, if you ask me. I saw some awesome pots, including one I particularly liked, in the shape of a macaw head... given the profusion, size and quality of hallucinogen pipes, they really knew how to get a party going hereabouts. And still do, I'm sure.
So do the monk-parrots, which flash green and chirring overhead, in pairs.